Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : SEO / SEM Discussions : Large Number of 301 Redirects

[webtender]

Hi, one of my clients is remodeling their website...and I need to figure out a solution to handle a large number of 301 redirects on Apache/Linux server. I know when I work with Windows boxes we've used ISAPI rewrite to handle this type of thing using map files, speeds things up significantly over having all the rewrites in htaccess file.

Does anyone know of an equivalent program for Linux/Apache that I could use to setup a large number of 301 redirects? It's not possible for me to do so on this particular site using .htaccess at all, so I must come up with another solution.

Any of you Linux experts run into this problem before and would you mind sharing any tips on how you did so?

I could always get someone to write a special script I would imagine that would have the old/new urls in a database, and then a custom 404 page that did a lookup, but if anyone has done this before and/or has some options or tips to share or other ideas, I'd be very grateful for your input.

Thanks

[1boss1]

Personally i'd try and install mod_rewrite, using .htaccess is going to be a lot cleaner than scripting methods. Have you got access to the httpd.conf file? You can place your rewrites in there instead, it's actually a better method than .htaccess in directories because the server doesn't need to traverse folders looking up the .htaccess file on page loads.

[webtender]

Hi thanks for the response. They have mod_rewrite installed on the server...that's not the issue. It's that it's not logical nor can the processor process thousands of rewrites in the httpd.conf file nor in the .htaccess file.

With a windows server I can have this taken care of using what's called a map file

which is an external file that is called from the main configuration file of ISAPI rewrite and allows one to have thousands of rewrites in a configuration file that is efficient and works great on all the servers I've used it on.

My dilemma, is that I don't know what options folks use when redirecting large numbers of files in Linux and was hoping I'd get some feedback here from anyone who had gone through this type of process before.

[1boss1]

Originally Posted by webtender

Hi thanks for the response. They have mod_rewrite installed on the server...that's not the issue. It's that it's not logical nor can the processor process thousands of rewrites in the httpd.conf file nor in the .htaccess file.

In the httpd.conf file, your rewrite rules will get mapped in a similar way when Apache is started and after that you won't suffer a performance hit on pageloads.

Also you may not need thousands of different directives, some rules can be written in a couple of lines that effect thousands of pages. It just depends on what your trying to do exactly. For instance the other week i redirected a 285,000 page website to a new URL when it underwent a name change just by doing:

RewriteEngine On

redirect 301 / http://www.oldsite.com/

So anyone who went to oldsite.com/somepage.php landed at newsite.com/somepage.php

If you let us know what URL structure your rewriting from and to, your .htaccess may only be several lines to accomplish the task.

[bear]

Originally Posted by 1boss1

 RewriteEngine On

redirect 301 / http://www.oldsite.com/

So anyone who went to oldsite.com/somepage.php landed at newsite.com/somepage.php

That doesn't appear correct to me. Shouldn't it be:

Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/

And does it really carry the URI request when using this? I'd always thought the content after the "/" had to be captured via rewrite or a similar mechanism such as:

/(.*) http://www.newsite.com/($1)

Not needed?

[1boss1]

Originally Posted by bear

That doesn't appear correct to me. Shouldn't it be:

Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/

Correct yes, a shift malfunction and redirect technically should of been Redirect with a capital although it will work using either upper/lower case.

And does it really carry the URI request when using this? I'd always thought the content after the "/" had to be captured via rewrite or a similar mechanism such as:

/(.*) http://www.newsite.com/($1)

Not needed?

Nope, the rule i have above carries the URI request and going to oldsite.com/some/random-page.php takes you directly to newsite.com/some/random-page.php

[webtender]

Thanks for the additional info... appreciate the help!